The High Commissioner. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ porter’s eyebrows went up. “It’s a posh area, that it is, sir.”

      “I have posh friends.”

      The Irishman recognised the rebuff: some Aussies were just like the bloody English, keeping everything to themselves. He gave Malone directions on how to get to Belgrave Square and went out of the room, wondering why a man who stayed in a thirty-bob bed-and-breakfast room and who gave only a shilling tip should have posh friends in Belgravia.

      Malone, a relaxed man who could sleep anywhere, even in an economy class airplane seat, was not tired by the long flight from Australia. He showered, changed into the light grey suit he had brought as a concession to the English summer, looked at his watch and decided to go and see Quentin at once. He had already made up his mind that he would confront Quentin with the arrest warrant at his home and not at his office at Australia House. He had never arrested a public official before and he did not want to be too public about it. Seven o’clock. The High Commissioner would probably be home now, doing whatever ambassadors did in their off-duty moments, having a bath, having a drink, wondering why they hadn’t taken up something easy like mountaineering or gun-running. It must be a bastard of a life, Malone thought: even the small diplomacies of a policeman’s life were difficult enough. But soon it would be over for Quentin.

      Riding in the taxi towards Belgravia Malone tried to rehearse what he would say to Quentin; and after a while gave up. How did you face a man, secure in a new life and a new identity, almost impregnable behind the importance of his office, with a crime that was distant in time and place, ten thousand miles and twenty-three years from here and now? “Your Excellency, in regard to an ancient murder . . .” Malone gazed out of the window of the taxi, trying to make his mind a blank, trusting that the right words would come by instinct when the moment arrived. Habit, sometimes, was a comfort.

      The taxi pulled in before the big four-storied house. Malone got out and conditioned by another habit paid the driver the exact amount on the meter.

      “You Aussies,” said the driver, an economist from Bethnal Green. “I bet you don’t have any balance of payments deficit.”

      Malone, who had never tipped a taxi-driver in his life, looked at the man blankly. “Belt up,” said the latter, and drove off, gnashing his gears instead of his teeth.

      Malone shrugged, beginning to appreciate why someone had once written that the English were incomprehensible, and turned towards the house. He was surprised at its size; he was a long way from the five-roomed house in Erskineville where he had grown up. Then he looked at the other houses in the square and saw that some of them were even bigger; this square was a manifestation of living that he had only read about. This was diplomatic territory; above almost every entrance there jutted a white flagpole, like a single blunt-tipped mammoth’s tusk; the huge front doors had the magnificent discouragement of a butler’s façade. The heavily elegant cliff-faces of the houses hid secrets that exercised the British Government; but none of them held such a secret as this house behind him. He turned, hesitated, then pressed the bell firmly.

      II

      The door was opened by a butler, something Malone had never experienced in his life before. He had all the appearance of the butlers Malone had seen in films: tall, portly, his aristocratic nose pushed back by a smell not apparent to men with less sensitive olfactory organs. But when he spoke his rich purple voice had a foreign tinge to it, and at once Malone thought he had come to the wrong address.

      “Is this the home of the Australian High Commissioner?”

      “It is, sir. May we ask whom you wish to see?” Monarchs and butlers, Malone thought: who else has the right to speak in the royal plural?

      “The High Commissioner. My name is Malone and I have a special message for him from the Premier of New South Wales.”

      The butler looked suspiciously at him, then he stood aside, opening the door wider. Malone stepped into an entrance hall and waited while the butler, like a bishop on his way to the altar, did a slow march towards the rear of the house. Though the hall was only sparsely furnished, Malone was at once aware that he was on the close outskirts of luxury. Through a half-open door he caught a glimpse of a room that reminded him of illustrations he had seen in Vogue, a periodical that had once been delivered by mistake to the Murder Squad and reduced the officers there to a state of depressed inferiority. He turned his head and saw himself in a huge gilt-framed mirror: he looked at the stranger there who seemed so out of place. He shifted his feet nervously in the thick carpet of the hall, feeling as awkward as a three-legged colt. Suddenly he wanted this business of Quentin over and done with quickly. He would come back in his old age and look at London.

      The butler came back down the hall with a girl. He stood aside, watchful as an old sea-lion; images kept flashing through Malone’s mind, but he could not see the butler as just a man like himself. The girl came forward.

      “I am the High Commissioner’s secretary.” She, too, had a slight accent. Stone the bloody crows, Malone thought, whatever happened to the Australian accent? “What was it you wanted?”

      “I have a personal message from the Premier of New South Wales.” He had no such thing; but he had not expected it to be so difficult to get in to see Quentin.

      “A letter?”

      “No, it’s verbal.”

      “I’m sorry, but the High Commissioner is busy. Could you not come to Australia House tomorrow?”

      Malone shook his head, trying not to appear too stubborn. He liked the look of the girl: tall, good-looking, blonde, and with a poise about her that he had looked for in the girls he had known and had so rarely found. But he sensed her impatience with him and he was aware of the cold disapproving eye of the butler. “The message is urgent and important.”

      The girl looked at the butler, and Malone read the message that passed between them. They think I’m some crank! He was appalled at the idea, remembering his own impatience as a policeman with cranks. His hand moved towards his pocket to take out his identification badge. Then his hand dropped back to his side and he smiled to himself at the situation and his own reaction to it.

      “Perhaps if you told the High Commissioner that the message concerns Tumbarumba, he might see me.”

      “Tumbarumba?” The girl was now convinced she was dealing with a crank.

      “It’s a town, not a disease.” This comes of employing foreigners, Malone thought; and began to feel more xenophobic by the minute. He had always been tolerant of the foreign migrants who had come to Australia, even those he had had to arrest; but now these two foreigners, the girl and the butler, were beginning to annoy him with their attitude towards him. Deep inside him he knew that regardless of their accents, they were only doing their job of trying to protect the High Commissioner from uninvited and unwanted guests. But they were also trying to prevent him from doing his job, one that he wanted finished as soon as possible. He was out of his depth here, in alien territory no matter that his country’s ambassador lived here, and he wanted to be on the plane at once for Sydney, home and an atmosphere where he didn’t have to be so secretive. He said sharply, “Just tell the High Commissioner that I’ve come from Tumbarumba.”

      The girl raised an eyebrow, as if recognising for the first time that Malone was accustomed to some authority. Without a word, but with a nod of warning to the butler, she turned and went back along the hall. Malone and the butler stood watching each other in the huge mirror: they were posed in the gilt frame like a tableau titled Suspicion. Then the girl came back.

      “This СКАЧАТЬ